What would be the best and most rated brand to buy?


I need around 300-500GB's

I hear western digital is superb, but a little pricey.

Western Digital is great but as you say kind of expensive.

I would try this:

Iomega 500 GB external hard drive

I haven't tried the 500 GB model but I got an 80 GB hard drive from this company and it's worked great.

NOTE: I wasn't sure what your price range was so I went with one of the least expensive things I could find. It doesn't support anything other than USB 2.0

Here is some Hard Drive buying advice:
Spend the extra $20-50. Your hard drive contains everything that you put on your computer and is the LAST component that you want to go cheap on- especially if it is a backup drive.

Also, when you are buying large drives (I would say 250GB and up) or if you are planning on doing a lot of copying/large file manipulation on that drive you will want to make sure that you have a large buffer. What is this 'buffer'? The buffer on a hard drive is basically the RAM for the Hard drive. When you want to move a file on the hard drive, the hard drive reads the data on the drive, saves it to buffer, and the rewrites it in a different location. When you save a file, it goes to the buffer then to the disc.

If you have a large hard drive for backup spending more for a larger buffer (say 16MB over 8MB) your backup times will drastically decrease because there is less lag between chunks of data being written to disc and being uploaded to the buffer.

Also note that if you are going to get a backup drive make sure that you are ordering one appropriate for what you are going to use it for. If you want an external one, or one that you can hook up to USB and move around from PC to PC, then make sure you get one because if you get a regular internal one you will simply have a metal and silicon box that you can only have installed in the computer itself- which can be a hassle and increases the risk of data loss due to damage to the drive. (Since it's not protected when you take it out.)

Hope this helps,
Ian

If you want a good one for 500GBs, go for a Maxtor maybe.
Their cheap/not cheap but got much space. (i dunno whats cheap and not cheap in USA..)
Maxtor Onetouch 4 - 500GB
Also look at these:
External/internal (from a search)
Have it your way, chose 1 that got exact space you need.

Ah, thanks those aren't to shabby.

And to the other people who still want to help out,

I'm spending a max of $120.

I wouldn't recommend Maxtor personally, a friend who runs a computer business and has been in the industry for atleast 10 years now has only ever had Maxtor's fail.

I found this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136175

Yes, it's $127.99 but I think the extra $8 is worth it. If you look at the reviews, Great Pros, no Cons!

Western Digital makes good drives. That drive should be good. My sisters have small WD externals for their laptops--and they've never had problems.